Alain badiou articles grammar

The infinite, as it is deployed in set theory, can therefore be taken as synonymous with the multiple: insofar as set theory employs sets as infinite collections of elements, it is formalising being itself. This paves the way towards a post-metaphysical philosophy radically distinct from the trajectory taken by the linguistic turn. It asserts, contrary to the thrust of the linguistic turn, that: 13 Moreover, this normalising of infinity challenges the logic of finitude.

The multiple can therefore be thought as in-finite. Philosophy must concern itself with things, rather than language. It cannot simply be substituted by science, destroyed along with metaphysics, or reduced to the study of language and its effects as a supplement to empirical science. Science does not tell the whole story with regard to being. Axioms And Subtractive Ontology The question arises as to how mathematics in particular and more specifically, set theory, as the foundational genre of mathematics is able to seize multiple-being in its discourse, and in a way that other languages are incapable of.

The answer concerns the specific status of axioms in mathematical thought. Whilst being, for Badiou, consists solely in multiples, which themselves consist of multiples of multiples, and so on indefinitely, it is apparent that the worlds or situations one encounters have at least the semblance of consistency. So, despite his decision that being is multiple, Badiou allows that there is, shall we say, some Oneness at work in the world.

Badiou however denies any being as such to this structuring effect, rendering it purely an operation, or count-as-one, of the multiples that constitute being. In this way what appears in the world has form and presence, rather than simply abyssal inconsistency. What allows ontology to be worldly or situational, entailing its submission to the count-as-one as a condition of access to the multiple, and yet still act as the science of being-qua-being, is that the axioms of set theory are such that its object — multiples — are implicit.

This allows it to deduce its theorems and proofs without bestowing any existence upon specific multiples — without giving any being to the one. As a situation itself, it must operate by ordering, structuring, making sense of, thereby making prodigious use of the count-as-one operation, but this is only ever acknowledged as an operation. But if such a structuring act of enumeration is the only way in which a multiple can be recognised as multiple, it means that the one is reduced to nothing more exalted than a product or result of a count, without any genuine existence of its own.

When Badiou states: 14 The precise reasoning which leads him to this conclusion is too detailed to elaborate here, so that we can only point to the reader to chapters of Being and Event where it is detailed. Only for Badiou this does not trail off into mystic frontiers, so long as we are attentive to mathematics. Set theory manifests multiples without betraying them in language.

To elaborate on this further, the axioms of set theory in particular were developed in response to the disturbing paradoxes which threatened its very credibility, and consequently the foundations upon which mathematics were based. That is to say, not even a mathematised language. Axiomatised set theory, however, inscribes the laws governing the presentation of being, whilst nonetheless holding being as such at a distance.

The axiom of separation can serve as an example. Equally important is that there is no real ground upon which the axioms are based — they cannot be proved, as they provide the rules under which proofs are given. It is necessary to decide upon an axiom. Whenever thought is faced with grasping being as such, it finds itself wandering, blind, and a decision must be taken in order to begin.

Which, if we provisionally accept his thesis equating mathematics and ontology, amounts to answering the question: what does mathematics tell us about being today? Simplifying it vastly one has no choice , the complexities specific to the relations between multiple-being and the count-as-one result in a sort of tiered system of multiples. But being is always already presented — counted as one — such that it is only apparent that something is the basis of the count after the count has taken place.

Badiou is aware of this. Moreover, the count or one-effect which structures multiplicity is never total or complete. A situation — say, for example, the situation of a particular workplace, or the situation of North America during the Civil War, etc. Just as, for instance, the set of rational numbers is both infinite and yet a consistent multiple.

The powerset operation, whose basis is inclusion, and which determines all the possible internal sets that can be composed from elements within a set, is then in accord with the representative function of the state. What gets left out in ontological analysis, however, is important: the suspension of multiple and one in ordered situations occasionally breaks down, undermining the consistency and security of a state of affairs.

Badiou terms this occurrence an event, and it is the consequences of this possibility for thought that will be examined in the second half of this essay. The linguistic turn, broadly speaking, problematized the relation of language to real, blowing apart, in particular, any simple representational model. Badiou inherits this problematic, but to get around it develops a theory of mathematical language as directly linked to being as such.

Given that there is a sense in which, for Badiou, as for Derrida, all discourse unwittingly betrays ontological presuppositions, the implication is that a discourse which, desiring consistency, neglects to risk its disturbance by science, is liable to reintroduce figures of the one — transcendence, gods, myths, presence — into the thought of being.

Any theoretical or philosophical discourse, insofar as it does not heed and restrict itself with reference to truths produced in mathematical ontology, remains susceptible to these transgressions. They nonetheless account for what we could call the normal or natural functioning of language, for Badiou. We could conclude that Badiou enacts a mathematical turn in philosophy, not simply in the sense that he rejects the linguistic turn in favour of a mathematical one, but in the sense that mathematics is now understood itself as a language with capacities unavailable in natural language and not simply in the sense mathematicians would already assent to.

The proposed relation linking philosophy to science is therefore also one which links mathematical language to natural language, with the former interrupting the latter, but nonetheless requiring it for elaboration mathematics requires philosophy, which employs natural, not mathematical language, to determine its status as ontology and elaborate upon its discoveries.

Mathematics, however, does not say everything when it comes to being, or have a monopoly on truth, but instead finds itself thinking being as the internal limit or impasse of its discourse. Mathematics, or science, does not exclusively underwrite truth as such, but instead, according to Badiou, gives the form of truths. This is what we want to explore in the second half of this paper.

This, in the schema elaborated in the previous chapter, would align Badiou with the scientistic strain of the linguistic turn, which seeks an ideal language, or a guarantee for the relation between language and the real. This picture is, however, incomplete. Being, for Badiou, is not so much that which is captured absolutely by the little letters of mathematics, but that which resists symbolisation — precisely the relation proposed by Lacan between the signifier and the real.

As Lacan writes but it could be Badiou speaking : "Just because I have written things that serve the function of forms of language doesn't mean I assure the being of metalanguage. Truth is what occurs as a subject mediates between these two realms, being and event. This, for Badiou, amounts to a way of thinking rationally that which inconsists, or which is not knowable or constructible via language.

Inconsistent multiplicity, or being qua being, is in this sense analogous to the real which resists symbolisation, but which mathematics nonetheless is able to account for — show, rather than say — in spite of this resistance. Cantor not only developed a concept of the actual or completed infinite, he established that there were different orders of infinite sets.

Sets including those such as the set of integers, rationals, and equally the set of odd numbers or primes, were what Cantor termed denumerable, meaning they could be put in a one-to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers. Using the work of Cohen, another mathematician, W. Easton, established that, far from being able to order the realm of the infinite by way of the power set axiom, any attempt to establish a quantitative measure of the power of infinite sets results in an immeasurable excess of parts over elements.

His claim is that it is being itself, in its infinitely multiple constitution, which organises this impasse, or the impossibility of measuring or thinking being exhaustively, or via language alone BE, It concerns the very relation between knowledge and being, or, equally, language and being. That is, to fix the being within knowable limits, or establish a 23 24 Gillespie, The Mathematics of Novelty, Hallward, Badiou, To banish the indeterminate from thought, by attempting to delimit, or know it definitively.

With the collapse of the Continuum Hypothesis and the thesis of the constructability of the universe of sets this desire is now shown to be impossible. Suddenly, a degree of subjectivity is introduced into the otherwise objective deduction of mathematical theorems. To deny the necessity of this choice is to will that one remains only within a constructible, knowable universe — a universe which mathematics itself shows to be incomplete.

There are, he claims, three main orientations. Either way, multiple-being, the void, and errancy, are foreclosed from the situation by an appeal to the sovereignty of language over being. A second approach is to forgo any attempt to limit or control excess by giving a place to the indeterminate, or generic, within thought. The third approach is to assign a transcendental fixing point to errancy so as to prevent its consequences for thought in advance.

This move is made predominately by theology and classical metaphysics. Language thereby progressively enriches the number of pure multiples admitted into existence without letting anything escape from its control. BE, Outside the domain of mathematics or ontology, Badiou perceives the hallmarks of this mode of thought almost everywhere — from logical positivism to the Greek or modern sophists and antiphilosophers.

It constitutes somewhat of a default orientation in all spheres of thought today. Essentially, it is an attempt to align thought with language, which for Badiou fails to account for multiple-being as such, and the fact that being, whilst it exceeds language, can be thought. It is not a stretch to conclude that for Badiou, constructivist thought constitutes the latent ontology of the linguistic turn, and that the thrust of Being and Event is to refute this position for good.

Essentially, the constructivist impulse participates in the logic of finitude. Thus, for constructivist thought, which allows for neither the event nor intervention, change must be thought as a sort of morphing from one language formation to another rather than a process of forcing which modifies situations according to events and truths.

It is no doubt a symptom of this problematic that for Foucault, the shift from one episteme to another constitutes a sort of inaccessible hole for thought, a mystery. Linda R. The first point of departure comes when Badiou accuses Agamben of conflating set theory with language. As we have shown, it is critical that for Badiou mathematics or ontology remains a language or a discourse, but in a fundamentally different way from natural language.

Language in a situation or world, that is, not mathematical language generally denotes for Badiou something that establishes properties that divide up and group together various multiples. It is commensurable with what Badiou terms knowledge distinct from truth which is what is or can be known within the parameters of an established situation.

As for Lacan, in other words, there is no metalangauge for Badiou: no way of articulating objectively in language or knowledge the truth of a situation from within it. Nor is there any totality of knowledge of a situation. Being and Event is ostensibly designed to advertise the fact that the ontological thesis governing constructivist thought, which links thought to language and language as medium.

Whereas for Badiou an event is not something that can be thought of as a process intrinsic to language. Any theory which sutures language to being or thought at the expense of errancy and multiplicity does not genuinely think novelty. The real exceeds language, and an event and truth procedure is the passage of the real into language, not the self-effacing gesture of our capture within it.

Peter Hallward New York: Verso, , ix. Mathematics cannot say or encapsulate being in a statement so much as show how thought can grasp it in its inconsistency via mathematical deduction. Event and Intervention via Naming Founded on the exclusion of the void, or the denial of their own impasse, situations are prone to instability.

Alain badiou articles grammar

In the realm of knowledge, this might be registered as paradoxes, impasses and aporias which distort the cohesion of established wisdom. One could think of it as an exposure to the void, such that the structuration which arranges the ordered hierarchy of a situation suddenly appears arbitrary when faced with the indifferent multiplicity it is built upon.

Events can occur in certain situations, which Badiou terms historical, as opposed to natural or normal, which contain a specific multiple called an evental site. This is an abnormal multiple which is itself contained within a situation but whose elements are not. Within the situation, this multiple is, but that of which it is a multiple is not.

It is the point at which a situation ceases attempting to count any and every multiple — its horizon, we might say. It is through this opening onto the void that the paradoxical multiple Badiou terms the event — paradoxical as it contains the elements of the evental site not contained within the situation, as well as itself, thereby violating the axioms of set theory — enters.

For the basis of determining what does and does not belong to the situation, and what it means from within it, is given by the encyclopaedia, for which the event appears as incomprehensible and paradoxical. This could be as simple as a scientific experiment whose outcome contradicts the norms of scientific understanding, which leads to its publication being denied and the experimenter ridiculed.

It is never clear, for instance, whether we can think of the event as a form of systemic risk inherent in situational or worldly form, based as it is upon the multiple, or something more, a singular dose of non-being, with no cause at all, tempting one to align it more with the divine or the miraculous. At best we can say this status is undecidable from the perspective of the situation a perspective we are forever bound to.

Nonetheless, nothing has really occurred yet, at least from the perspective of the situation, which, for all intents and purposes, is content to ignore the interruption. It is necessary to explain how the inexplicable — the event and its consequences — will enter the world, so to speak, becoming explicable, and transforming the situation in the process.

The first step in an intervention — in a way its index and condition — is to name the event. In his work after Being and Event, Badiou has shifted from emphasising a name for the event towards an evental statement see, for example, TW The principle remains the same: the statement bears the trace of the event after its disappearance, and in this sense remains incomprehensible to the encyclopedia.

Naming is therefore a mechanism by which language can reach out and touch the void, referring, ostensibly, to nothing BE, A point at which language, even if it cannot explain that which exceeds it, can at least acknowledge it. There are a number of reasons why Badiou might give this importance to naming, some of which are explicit in the text of Being and Event and some of which are not.

A signification is always distributed through the language of a situation, the language of established and transmitted knowledges. A nomination, on the other hand, emerges from the very inability of signification to fix an event, to decide upon its occurrence, at the moment when this event — which supplements the situation with an incalculable hazard — is on the edge of its disappearance.

A nomination is a 'poetic' invention, a new signifier, which affixes to language that for which nothing can prepare it. A nomination, once the event that sustains it is gone forever, remains, in the void of significations. NN, The appearance of irrational numbers is therefore no less than an evental rupture in the encyclopedia of Greek number theory.

The original word from the Greek used to name them, alogos, bears connotations of both their inexpressible and unthinkable aspect. Only the empty name can traverse this distance, serving as an index of the void under the banner of which the enquiries can take place into the consequences of assuming these numbers part of the situation of number theory.

Their deployment in a situation establishes the basis for a transformation in knowledge via truth that will take place in and through language on the basis of this evental disturbance. Cohen and the Form of Truth Procedures Starting out from the evental nomination, a process ensues whereby the consequences of the event are investigated within the situation, literally unfolding the truth of the situation.

In the realm of ontology, the methodology employed by Cohen to refute the thesis of constructability and prove the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis from ZF set theory, serves as a blueprint for this concept of truth as immanent process rather than propositional form or correlational adequacy. Without defining these sets explicitly, he then found a way of making statements about this generically extended model solely within the language acceptable for the constructible model.

The trick is that these conditions are perfectly expressible within the original model, but nonetheless provide the means for creating generic sets. Cohen was able to show that once a model of set theory including generic sets was established, the cardinality of the denumerable infinite could take on almost any higher cardinality not necessarily the next highest , thereby demonstrating the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis from set theory.

Although the subject is only ever working with the knowledge and language of the situation, the process takes place in an arbitrary, randomised way, which rearranges this knowledge into something which comes to exceed all of its prior determinations — this is what genericity is. In this way, whatever its positive content, all truth, in its form, carries the one message for a situation: your house is made of sand.

That is to say, structured upon the inconsistent multiplicity of being, situations are hostage to chance by way of an event , inconsistency errancy and paradox. This is what renders the truth of any particular situation nonetheless pertinent any situations whatsoever. Truth, in this formulation, materialises in the interstices of knowledge, and comes to be by reordering and weaving new configurations through the enquiries from terms acceptable within the encyclopaedia.

The theory of forcing then shows how situations are transformed to incorporate present this generic set. These are terms available in the established language of the situation, but which take on a new sense with reference to the event. Or, more precisely, they are drained of all meaning that they may have had in the situation, keeping only this relation to the event.

How does this work? The subject produces statements in the subject language, littered with incomprehensible to those unaware of the event names — Christ, Communism, Cubism — which make claims as to what will be veridical in a situation that includes the generic truth produced by the subject. But only in the sense that truths forge a new language, or more precisely are nothing more than the transformation in language that takes place in reference to an event; not the content of what is said, but space between two languages.

It is not a matter of a transcendental signified or of a metalangauge, but of convoking the void from within language. Suffice to say what is important for Badiou is the way in which Cohen discovered a way of speaking about the generic, a multiple made up of anything whatsoever, with no logic or property defining it, using resources which were indeed constructible, or linguistic — expressible in mathematical language.

That is to say, without stepping outside the situation, or outside the bounds of finitude organised by the encyclopaedia and language, the truth of this situation can be made manifest to this situation in a generic process. It is a matter of subverting the bounds of finitude from within, on the basis that these finite forms of knowledge and language are already, in a sense, infinite remember the constitutive excess of the state over the situation, organised by the multiplicity of being.

The fact that there is no metalanguage therefore does not entail that there is no truth; simply that truth is not reducible to the sayable. Take, for instance, the case of Galileo: his challenge is to articulate a new idea of the cosmos, but he only has available to him the knowledge and language of the science of his times. Because it draws on the resources of the situation whilst at the same time subverting them, giving them a new sense, the outcome is to transform the very language and knowledge particular to the situation and in turn the situation itself.

In which case the situation has already been transformed beneath his feat. Instead truth is a matter of transforming the set of theories and assumptions which define what counts as true or false in a particular situation, in reference to being, by way of a generic process. Moreover, despite emerging in a local situation under the aegis of a finite subject, truths are nonetheless universal insofar as they bear on this indifference of being, exceeding whatever finite colour a specific situation gives to them.

That is to say, despite a generic truth process emerging in a site within a specific situation, it is such that the consequences it develops on the basis of the event are pertinent in any situation. The clearest instance of this is in mathematics. If a slave knows nothing about the evental foundation of geometry, he remains incapable of validating the construction of the square of the surface that doubles a given square.

But if one provides him with the basic data and he agrees to subjectivate it he will also subjectivate the construction under consideration. TW, A particular mathematical truth therefore has a local site of emergence in this case, Greek mathematics , something which is integral to it, and yet is nonetheless available in any situation whatsoever.

Needless to say, this thesis is directed against the general democratic consensus around respect for particularities, and the pragmatic or relativistic conception of truth it relies on. His theory of truth processes counters this by showing how thought can be both finite in its actual existence in situations, cobbled together using local knowledges and languages by mortal individuals, but universal in its implications and eternal in its subjective unfolding.

It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. Derrida, Of Grammatology.

In the introduction we examined the constellation linking philosophy, sophistry, and antiphilosophy for Badiou, specifically around the question of language and its relation to thought. The way in which he achieves this without, so to speak, abolishing the sophist, or, in the terms of this thesis, without simply advocating a neoclassical reaction against the consequences of the linguistic turn and critical philosophy more generally, has been the problem investigated in this thesis.

After pragmatism, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and archaeology. After a chapter in philosophical enquiry with many diverse aspects, but which in one way or another challenged the traditional philosophical understanding of truth, and the selfunderstanding of the very institution of philosophy, on the basis of investigations into language.

And, moreover, the integral role of language, not just in the fact that reinventing rationalism today requires a theory of language mathematical discourse but the critical role language plays in ushering truths into the world? These can be understood as an attempt to distill the logic of finitude elaborated by the linguistic turn, or at least as the terms of debate within it insofar as not everyone agrees with them, but at least takes them as key sites of contestation : i First language is conceived as a formal system or structure, external to and independent of the knowing subject, and moreover constituting some form of totality.

To understand language is to begin to understand thought, as Dummett would have it. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive of a private language, or a equally a metalanguage, insofar as either of these would at some point entail taking up a position outside language, a position from which no thought could have sense. Thought is therefore always bound to the linguistic system which conditions it rather than taking place without presuppositions , whether this entails the specific language in which that thought takes place, the cultural or symbolic context in which the subject is situated, or the discursive norms that he or she must invariably have recourse to.

Only within this context can thought have sense. This context, or excess, can take on many different names, such as a paradigm, episteme, conceptual scheme, apparatus, ideology, or symbolic order. There is also an excess of language over the real, the possibility of multiple theoretical or conceptual schemas being in accord with a single set of empirical data, and even of constituting the empirical world as it appears to thought.

But what separates it from Kant is, quite simply, this discovery as to the link between language and thought i. The consequences which follow from it ii — v could perhaps be understood as reformulations of the Kantian gesture on the basis of this discovery. Badiou has what we could call, borrowing one of his own terms, a subtractive relation to the linguistic turn, and therefore to the precepts of the linguistic matrix we have identified.

A diagonalisation of their knowledge that forces a new, post finite, philosophical situation, without actually adding anything concrete. Thought, for Badiou, takes place when language is separated from itself by chance, in relation to an event which exposes the situation to its being, or real. What is critical is that Badiou, in this way, acknowledges the force of finitude, so to speak, and specifically the knot which binds language and thought.

To elaborate further, he accepts that thought is, in a certain sense, limited by language. There is a norm of finitude at work in any situation, which is its fortification by a state and an encyclopedia. This is why constructivism, according to which language marks the limits of thought and accords with being seamlessly, constitutes a sort of default orientation for thought.

It is not that thought takes place at some remove from language from rules, discursive norms or logical formulas, etc. To revise this procedure: being, as multiple, necessarily exceeds the grasp of language due to its recourse to a structuring or oneeffect which places it on the side of representation and the state, rather than truth.

We could render this is Foucauldian terms: knowledge, for instance, fails to account for its complicity in power relations; or in psychoanalytic terms, the real resists symbolisation, due to the slippage of the signifier and the impossibility of metalangauge. For an antiphilosopher, this gap between what can be said and known and the real as such might be grasped in an heroic act of the philosopher, or a selfeffacing gesture.

In this sense, Badiou maintains that truth can be made apparent from within this situation without the supposition of a metalanguage, or a view from nowhere which would evaluate it objectively. The true and the false, insofar as they are categories of language, do not tell the whole story when it comes to being. One does not need absolute certainty for there to be truth, but merely fidelity to the hypothesis that there is a truth of the situation which exceeds its current knowledge, even if it cannot be articulated yet.

The excess of signification then figures not as a principle which entails the invariable submission of thought to a language or symbolic order, or paradigm, or game… which precedes and conditions the subjects knowledge, and causes a discord between thought and the real, but as the guarantee that being itself is infinite, or multiple, and at odds with any finite enclosure.

It is mathematics, which subtracts itself from natural language by way of the axiom, which conditions this understanding of the infinite. It is this proximity that requires him to formulate a concept of truth based on the presupposition of finitude, so to speak, rather than a neoclassical or metaphysical one, which denies finitude from the outset in favour of a dogmatic realism or positivism.

The best way to describe this eccentric idea of truth may be as castrated, insofar as the truth, as a matter of chance encounters, blind fidelity, and words and phrases without any clear sense relative to the language they make use of, is anything but certain. In fact, the True for Badiou would only exist as the final incorporation of the generic set into the situation — at which point it would pass into knowledge, and the situation would once again miss the mark as to its being.

All we have of truth is the process aimed at this and the effects it produces. One never knows the truth, in this sense, but can discern it in the shift from one language to another, one finitude to another. This very shift testifying to the infinite, or to the fact that finitude is not an absolute but merely an effect, less the horizon of thought than the materials available to it in grasping the infinite multiplicity on which it is based.

Because there is a sense in which it is the linguistic turn that allows Badiou to break with critique, and the finitude it entails. Of course, this can go the other way too: Badiou never fully escapes from the linguistic turn, but remains bound to it, and in turn never fully overcomes critique. This would seem to be the criticism of Badiou implicit and sometimes explicit in recent revivals of realism.

The dogmatism of anti-adequation has become as problematic as the old pre-Kantian dogmatism. Perhaps this is why the guarantee for a realist outlook is so often drawn from the resources of the hard sciences fossils, stars, radioactive isotopes, etc. This is where the philosophies of finitude seem weakest, and the evidence for realisms strongest.

On the other hand, realists are hamstrung when it comes to thinking social, political, and artistic processes, and especially when it comes to thinking about truth in these registers. Leaving aside the question of whether his understanding of science is adequate or comprehensive, his philosophy does give a cogent answer to the question of: how can we exhibit the truth of a specific historical juncture, language, or society, without stepping outside of it?

This is less a question pertinent to the hard sciences than one which presses upon practitioners of the human or social sciences, as well as in psychoanalysts, artists, and political activists. Badiou answers the question by acknowledging the force of finitude, so to speak, and the integrally linguistic limits on thought it imposes. But it is nonetheless able to show, via the generic and forcing, how these limiting principles do not put the real out of reach from thought.

And, moreover, how we can understand the changes rent by truths in the world. Does one need to accept his mathematical-ontological premise in order to find his wider defense of universality and truth — in the fields of art, politics, and love, for instance — either useful or valid? Not because there are universal norms which persist in all of them, but because thought is transmitted at a level not strictly coterminous with its linguistic aspect, even if its only concrete substance is indeed the sign and the letter.

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The Fixation of Belief Hayden Garriques. Prevalence of tick-borne encephalitis virus inIxodes ricinus ticks in Finland Marina Sidorenko. Exchange interaction in InAs nanocrystal quantum dots Uri Banin. Exceptions to recognition failure as a function of the encoded association between cue and target David Bryant. A perspective on the electro-thermal co-design of ultra-wide bandgap lateral devices Srabanti Chowdhury.

Poets are men who refuse to utilize language. Now, since the quest for truth takes place in and by language conceived as a certain kind of instrument, it is unnecessary to imagine that they aim to discern or expound the true. In fact, the poet has withdrawn from the language-instrument in a single movement. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude that considers words as things and not as signs.

Poetry, turned away from the world on the wrong side of language , is mere bourgeois aestheticism. By contrast, for the writer of prose Marx, for example, or Sartre as he imagines himself words are not things but actions p. They are interventions by which the writer engages the world in order to change it: "To write is both to disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader" p.

Badiou does not directly gainsay Sartre his mentor. In fact, he says that poetry "is not an aesthetic category" "The Age of the Poets," p. The suspicion that Heidegger has had a hand in shaping Badiou's position is confirmed by his essay on "The Philosophical Status of the Poem after Heidegger" , where poetry is said to free thinking from the logic of propositions in which words are mere "terms" of designation in representational-calculative thinking.

As Heidegger says in Was Heisst Denken? It is not made of concepts but, like poetry, is made of words, where words are rather more sounds than signs or instruments of nomination, assertion, and representation. Thinking is less an act than a responsibility or responsiveness to what calls for it, namely like Augustine's time that which resists the grasp of concepts, as if thinking were drawn before anything else toward the unthinkable.

Recall Emmanuel Levinas on the "there is" il y a , existence without existents: " There is , in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is is an impersonal form, as in it rains, or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential. Which is all very well, until one realizes that Badiou seems impatient with his own paradoxes, as when, in "The Age of the Poets," he extracts from poetry "certain maxims of thought" -- for example: "Rimbaud.

If Badiou's thesis is that "the age of the poets animates a polemic against meaning" p. Likewise in "Poetry and Communism" a lecture at the Sorbonne published here for the first time , poetry is not "thinking about nothing" but engagement in Sartre's sense particularly in its celebration of the Spanish Civil War :. These poems tell us that the communist idea is the compassion for the simple life of the people afflicted by inequality and injustice -- that it is the broad vision of a raising up, both in thought and in practice, which is opposed to resignation and changes it into a patient heroism p.

No doubt it's unreasonable to require occasional writings spanning nearly a half-century to fit together like the consecutive integers of an argument. Dialecticians, after all, have always bent the law of non-contradiction. For example, in "The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process" , Badiou remarks upon "the ambiguity of the critical task of socialist realism," which "consists in determining the ideological existence of the artworks, by producing the concepts of their historical belonging.

But it also consists in unveiling the theoretical existence that marks the singularity of the 'great works'" p. In this event the social realist "will use neither the scientific concepts used to describe the historical process, nor ideological concepts.